Sainsbury's: your new local bookshop?

According to The Bookseller magazine, Sainsbury's is the UK's chain bookseller of the year, 'an alternative place to buy and browse'. Maybe - if you're only in the market for books about Michael MacIntyre and Madeleine McCann

Browsing? In Sainsbury's? I decided to check it out. Yesterday I cycled along to my local branch and had a good look over the literature on offer. I wouldn't dignify that activity with the word browsing, however: it took me more time to find the book section (tucked away next to shelves filled with WD-40) than it did to decide I didn't want to buy anything it was selling. There were a handful of recipe books, a top 40 chart (select titles: Kate Morton, The Distant Hours; Mary Burton, Dying Scream; Felix Riley, The Set Up; Michael McIntyre, Live and Laughing) and a small section dedicated to a book about Madeleine McCann. If pushed, I could have walked away with The Fry Chronicles; otherwise there was nothing I even wanted to pick up. And I looked at every book. I even counted them: 88 different titles. That's more than Heinz's 57 varieties. But fewer than the different types of cheese available in the same shop.

Most depressingly of all, the children's section was limited to one small row at ground level. It looked about as thrilling as – well – a supermarket shelf. Selling children's books should be about selling excitement and wonder. The bookshops of my childhood were beautifully decorated gateways to mystery and adventure. It's sad to think that my daughter's generation may have no more attachment to choosing their next read than to choosing a tin of beans, and that books will be lumped in with the general boredom of cleaning products, potatoes and checkouts.

So much for "celebrating" browsing. Perhaps I'm romanticising too much. It's easy to be snotty about the books in Sainsbury's, and to complain about their lack of range. The chain could reasonably argue that it gives people what they want and does it well. If people wish to read about Michael McIntyre, that's entirely their choice. If it annoys sanctimonious media types like me, so much the better.

Genuinely troubling, though – and a matter of hard fact rather than emotion – is that the way supermarkets sell books is damaging to most of the publishing industry. Nearly all the books on offer in Sainsbury's, for instance, were priced at two for £7. That's less than the price of a ready meal for each book. Once you've factored in the costs of editing, proofreading, typesetting and production, how much does that leave the author per copy? Not much. How much profit does the publisher make? Not much. How much could a small specialist press hope to make at those prices? A colossal loss. Only a very few books can hope to become economically viable.

Meanwhile, the fact that these books are sold in supermarkets has an effect on every other book. Scooping a healthy percentage of bestsellers out of the traditional marketplace has had a huge impact on the profits of all other booksellers – and is a big part of the reason they're all struggling so much now. When these shops go, so will a great many publishers. While there may still be variety online, the loss leader prices in supermarkets devalue books as a whole. They make people resent paying more than £5 for a new book, and so give copyright thieves an excuse to feel self-righteous about refusing to pay the prices publishers charge for ebooks. Why hand over £8 for an electronic book when books in the supermarket cost less than £4? Publishers are struggling to provide a persuasive answer.

Awarding an industry prize to Sainsbury's seems idiotic, like awarding a peace prize to Tony Blair. It's another symptom of the malaise in the trade. But then, who else is in the running for the Martina Cole general or chain bookselling company of the year award? Waterstone's, which has been on the verge of collapse for the past year? WH Smith, whose bookselling section should have been put out of its misery in the early 80s? The fact is that there are no bookselling chains worthy of any kind of prize at all. The parasites have all but eaten the host. The host should stop thanking them.